How I Made It: Simon Loopuit, Founder of VoxGen

SITTING in the cockpit of his six-seater Beechcraft Bonanza, Simon Loopuit was
flummoxed. “The knobs, the buttons, trying to talk to air traffic control,
trying to write down their instructions on your knee with the plane bumping
around. You couldn’t have written the script for something so badly
designed,” said Loopuit.

But it gave the former investment banker an idea. Could speech recognition
make a pilot’s life easier? And then another thought: why hadn’t speech
recognition ever achieved its potential?

More than a decade later, Loopuit is beginning to enjoy the fruits of his
inquiring mind. His company, VoxGen, now provides giants such as Centrica
and HBOS with speech recognition software designed to keep the customer
sweet — rather than being held in a queue.

With its headquarters in London’s Centre Point and offices in Chicago and
Berlin, VoxGen employs almost 50 staff and should turn over £5m this year.